How to Make a Roux
How to Make a Roux:
Knowing how to make a roux is one of the most useful skills in French cooking. It takes less than ten minutes. It uses two ingredients. And it underpins a significant portion of classic French sauces, from a silky béchamel to a deep, rich espagnole.
A roux is simply equal parts fat and flour, cooked together over heat. That’s it. Get the roux right, and the sauce almost builds itself. Get it wrong, and no amount of whisking will save you.
Chef Fabrice’s Approach: Make It, Store It, Use It
Chef Fabrice likes to make a batch of roux: butter and flour cooked together, and keeps it in a container in the fridge.
When a sauce needs thickening, the roux is already there. A spoonful goes into a warm stock or milk, and the sauce comes together quickly without starting from scratch each time. It’s a kitchen habit that works just as well at home. Make the roux once, use it across the week.
What to Watch For in the Pan
Knowing how to make a roux well comes down to a few things worth paying attention to.
The smell changes. A raw roux smells floury and a little starchy. Once it’s properly cooked, the smell shifts to something nutty and clean. That’s the signal the flour is ready.
The texture changes too. At the start, the mixture looks rough and uneven. As the butter melts fully into the flour and the starch begins to cook, it smooths out into a paste that pulls away from the sides of the pan.
Heat matters. Too high and the butter burns before the flour cooks. Medium heat, steady stirring, and patience get the result right.
Roux
Ingredients
- 75 Grams Butter 2.5 oz
- 75 Grams Flour 2.5 oz
Instructions
- Melt the butter in a small pan.
- Add the flour and mix it well with a whisk.
- Then let it cook for 30 seconds to 1 minute. Keep stirring, it should not color.
- Place it in a small bowl, to use as a thickener for your sauce-making.
- To use it, chop the roux, and add it in small pieces to your simmering sauce little by little while mixing with the whisk until you reach the desired thickness.
Notes
Take It Further in the Kitchen
Reading about how to make a roux is a start. Doing it in a working kitchen, with a chef watching your pan and correcting your heat, is where the technique actually beds in.
Our Sauce Making Class in Paris is a hands-on four-hour session covering at least five sauces, from stock to finished plate, with a tasting and light meal at the end. The class is taught in English, in our kitchen in Montmartre, and it’s built around exactly this kind of foundational technique. Cook’n With Class
You can go straight to the French Sauce Making Class booking page or any of our French Cuisine Classes.